Leanna wrote to McGlashan, "The snow came on so sudden that we had barely time to pitch our tent, and put up a small brush shed, as it were. One side open, thus" -she drew a sketch- "this brush shed was covered with pine boughs, and then covered with rubber coats, quilts etc. My Uncle Jacob & family also had a tent, he camped near . .;:: . ... .. - " I ..., r - , ""t F"" " . t I .. '-=' - . . '- , i I: \ï .\.. .... days." T amsen is said to have kept a detailed journal, but no such docu- ment has ever been found. On Novem- ber 30th, Patrick Breen, at the lake camp, wrote in his diary, "No living thing without wings can get about." The emigrants began to die, in what Donald Grayson, an archeologist at the University of Washington, has de- '- - -- .-I ':"- \\ ______ A. ), I ^ lit t \.J · '"'\ " w--';'\.J.-;'" _ _ _.: A ., " J'\ ",. '\ , , , , , .. , - ,"', ." ",. \ -- " --- --"""'-".. "" A"'" · __ -_ J_- Donner, dozens of whom still live in California, hold big, jolly reunions. Lo- chie Paige, Elitha Donner's sixty-one- year-old great-granddaughter and the family spokesperson, told me that she supports the archeological work. "The stigma that goes with the cannibalism is something that is still around," she said. "I think that they will give us answers." " '- 1- , , . .J <t# .-.-... 7" \, , l .. \ + '- . I ..... , -- ) -i' ttt I I 'A ". - , --- _... .. I I" \"" ". \ ,. - , \ - -.. --... --..., - , 1 .. - .. -:.......... -- -. '.... :;. -- ""\. . '- . . . , - '. . Frances and Eliza Donner (second and third from right) attended the dedication of Pioneer Monument, in 1918. us." Later, she told her youngest sister, Eliza, "We did not have any hut, our winter quarters were made of a scaffold, covered with boughs and what few blankets and quilts we could spare and we had a small tent to sleep in. Our scaf- >- fold was built right at the root of the tree and we cooked under the scaffold." The Donners, either because they couldn't rejoin their companions at the ð lake or because they preferred not to, 2 stayed in the meadow for the next four I- months. With them were the widow w Wolfinger and five hired men: Noah ?2 James, Joseph Reinhardt, James Smith, Samuel Shoemaker, and a sixteen-year- S old boy of Mexican and French origin named Jean Baptiste Trudeau-a total <( of twenty-two people. The snow was debilitating, and, as Trudeau said later, the difficulty of gathering wood meant that they "were often without fires for ". I . f t .. , I " scribed as a "case study of mediated natural selection in action": the single men, who had done the heavy lifting in the Wasatch, went first, and then the very old and the very young. George Donner, Grayson believes, was spared in these first rounds because his injured hand made him an invalid. Occasion- ally, men from the lake camp trekked the seven miles to the meadow and brought back reports of the Donner clan. By the end of December, Breen noted, Jacob Donner, Shoemaker, Reinhardt, and Smith were dead, and "the rest of them in a low situation." I n the summer of 2003, Dixon and Schablitsky started an excavation in Alder Creek meadow, a picnic area in the Tahoe National Forest long identi- fied as the Donner Family Camp, where the descendants of George and Jacob The archeologists found some seven hundred and fifty artifacts in Alder Creek meadow, and, over a long weekend late last spring, Schablitsky visited Dixon's lab in Missoula to study them. She sat at a wooden table, with the collection spread before her, each piece in a small bag: shards of bottle glass (aqua, olive, colorless), ceramics (shell-and -feather- edge ware, decorative sprig-painted china), fragments of mirror, lantern glass, buttons, wagon gear, lead shot, writing slate. Schablitsky was trying to visualize the layout of the camp. "We have pieces of slate and teacups-did Tamsen Don- ner sit here, huddled around the fire hearth with her children, practicing spell- ing and math?" she said. "Is this where they had their tea?" Nearby, Dixon worked at a com- puter, organizing an extensive electronic database of the artifacts. She swivelled THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 24, 2006 143